2
ON SEPTEMBER 29, BRUNO HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE house for a little more than a week. That was long enough for me to understand that he didn’t return phone calls with the promptness one values in a cat-sitter. I’d had to leave four or five messages just to get him to call me back and tell me wearily—he might’ve been talking to his mom—that the cats were fine. So when his name came up on my caller ID a few days later, before I’d even begun to pester him again, I felt a twinge of unease, and the moment I heard his voice, my whole being constricted like a muscle in spasm. He’d let Biscuit out as usual, he told me, and she hadn’t come back. I said nothing. He’d thought she would, since it was raining. It had been raining almost nonstop. I felt ill. I should never have told him he could let her out. I should never have let her out at all, considering what had happened to Gattino a year before. I asked Bruno how long she’d been gone, and it was his turn to fall silent. “Was it Sunday?” I wanted to throttle him through the phone. “Saturday, Saturday morning.” Two and a half days. Back when we’d lived in the village, she’d stayed away for as long as three, sustained by the generosity of our neighbors and an abundance of slow-moving mice and voles. I told him to go out and call her. “It’s best if you say her name three times.” I showed him how F. and I did it; I used a falsetto. It’s true that was the voice she most responded to, but I suspect I was also taking some mean pleasure in the thought of this big, preening kid being made to squawk, “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” in a mortified falsetto on the back porch of our house, within earshot of a women’s college dorm. “Try it now,” I told him. “And call me if she comes. Call me if she doesn’t come.”
We brought our new cat into the house the way they always tell you to, sequestering her behind closed doors for a few days so our other cats could get used to her scent and she to theirs, then bringing her out in a carrier, like a visiting dignitary in a covered litter, for a formal presentation. None of it was necessary. It helped that one of our cats was very old and arthritic, and another was old and senile, and Tina, the third, was almost as fearful as she’d been four years before. But most of the credit is Biscuit’s. She was so easygoing. When the other cats approached her carrier, she rubbed against the gate and purred. Nobody purred back, but nobody struck at her either, and within a week the new arrival was eating with the older residents and calmly touching noses with them when they met on the stairs.
She had health problems, starting with the copious wet sneezing. A small raised bump on her neck became an open sore that made you wince with pity and disgust. Biscuit herself seemed oblivious to it, except for the two times a day when we daubed the wound with antibiotic ointment. Another cat would have gone into hiding whenever it saw its owners heading toward it with nonchalant expressions and a tube of Neosporin. This one stood her ground. She struggled, of course, rearing up on her hind legs and striking out with her claws, snorting with anger and congestion. But at some point she let herself be overpowered and tended to, all the while making it clear how so not crazy she was about it. Maybe it was because she was still young and hadn’t perfected the tactics that would make her so hard to medicate later on. I thought of this as being somehow indicative of her character, of its forthrightness and stalwartness. We don’t consider these feline qualities—if anything, you’d call them canine qualities—but intelligent animals often display traits that seem alien to their species. Think of those aloof dogs that don’t even prick up an ear when a visitor makes an entrance. Think of horses that stay imperturbable in the midst of cannon fire. The more intelligent the animal, the more of its traits will seem uncharacteristic or anomalous, until it becomes hard to say if any of its traits are characteristic: this may be why we have so much trouble deciding what is truly human.
Biscuit was still healing when she went into heat. She was so little that we’d figured she was younger. She’d pace about the house squalling, the soft furrow below her tail suddenly, shockingly distended. The transformation of her body seemed to puzzle her; her cries held a puzzled note. What’s happening to me? What do I want? Why do I want it so bad? Here, too, I’m projecting. There was nothing for her to be puzzled about. She had instinct, which is to organisms what gravity is to matter, and so on some level she knew what was going on. Still, the baffled-sounding appeals went on for days. We had to be watchful at the door to keep her from lunging out or a horny male from stealing in. The other cats looked at her strangely. Even our old tom Ching, who was gaunt with hyperthyroidism and addled with dementia and hadn’t been interested in sex even when he still had his balls, sniffed at her as she passed and opened his mouth in a Kabuki grin. F. would growl at him, urging him to remember what a tiger he was.
I was fascinated by what was happening to our cat, and especially by the flagrancy of her vulva. It looked so much like a woman’s. That was part of the shock of it. Our Biscuit had turned into one of those mythical hybrids like a mermaid or a Minotaur: a little cat with a woman’s sex between her legs, her hind ones. My wife has a dark view of sex, or say, a tragic view, and I often imagined how that view might apply to Biscuit. She’d be touched to see our new pet growing up into an adult female who in the natural course of things would mate and bear kittens that she’d ferry proudly around in her mouth. And at the same time, F. would know how cruel the mating could be, the feline penis being barbed and its possessor securing his grip on the female with teeth and claws. And she would know how that cruelty pales beside the cruelty of sex among humans, who being born without barbs on their genitals have to fashion them, the males and the females both. Maybe I’m just speaking of my own view of sex, which is also pretty dark. But we were both relieved when Biscuit went out of heat and we could take her to be spayed.
The first time I thought I might love F.—that is, thought of her as someone I might come to love—was at a tea shop in my old neighborhood in the city. I don’t like tea, but F. did, and I suppose the fact that I agreed to meet at a tea shop was a sign that I already wanted to please her. I drank coffee; it was bad. F. took her tea with milk and so much sugar, dumping in spoon after precariously heaped spoon of it, that I could smell the sweetness across the table. If you’d asked me a month before, I would’ve said that a tea shop would be the last place on earth you’d go to meet her. Her watchful, brittle cool seemed more suited to a dimly lit cocktail lounge with cunningly shaped glassware filled with liquor blue as antifreeze. Over tea, she told me that when she was nine or ten, her family had moved to a new town, where other kids immediately identified her as a goat. Girls made a show of ignoring her as she passed them in the school hallways. Boys called out taunts as she walked home. The worst oppressors were three or four popular girls in her class. They made F. wish she had magic powers. I asked her if she’d wanted them for revenge; I’m sure I sounded eager. She looked offended. “No, not revenge—I wasn’t that kind of kid. I wanted to conjure up Beatle dolls.” She saw my incomprehension. “To give the girls. Those girls were always talking about how they wanted Beatle dolls. Everybody wanted them back then; it was the year of Beatle dolls. And I thought how cool it would be if I had magic powers so I could come up to them and say”—she snapped her fingers—“‘Look, Beatle dolls!’”
Her smile had a child’s guilelessness. Just so a child might offer you a bouquet of wildflowers she’d picked from the side of the road. I think I mooed, “Oh, that’s sweet!” I know I reached for her, meaning to stroke her cheek. She shrank from me. The cool that had receded a little dropped back down like a visor, with an almost audible click. I was too mortified to apologize. It would be like apologizing for farting. We left the tea shop and stood outside in the falling dusk, watching the pavement change color as the traffic light on the corner clicked from red to green. I was sure this was the last time I’d ever see her. “I’m sorry about what happened back there. I didn’t mean anything.” I waited for her to say, “It’s all right.”
She said, “I just don’t like to be touched like that. I don’t know you.” Then she left.
Afterward, it seemed to me that I’d been exposed to two completely different personalities. One was magnanimous; the other was grudging. One would repay ostracism with magic Beatle dolls; the other recoiled from a touch. One was deeply attuned to other people’s desires; the other was almost oblivious to them, or at least oblivious to the desire for forgiveness of someone who’d committed a minor social error (at least I thought it was minor; it wasn’t as if I’d done what a friend of mine, a singer, had once had done to her by a guy she met at one of her gigs. “I really like the way you sing,” he’d told her when she sat down with him during the break. “It came right from the clit.” And by way of illustration, he reached for it). The alternation between these personalities was so shocking that my automatic response was to label one as the real F. and the other a false self, a facade, a cutout. And for the rest of that night and many nights afterward, I occupied myself trying to figure out which was which. If the true self is the one that’s most readily evident to an observer, then the true F. was the watchful, defensive one, her gaze unblinking, her soft features impassive. If the true self is the one that’s kept tucked away like a hole card, the true F. was the one who beamed as she gave treasure to traducers.
I know this episode doesn’t say much about her. She likes tea, not coffee, or liked it then, with milk and lots of sugar. As a child, she experienced displacement and the cruelty of her peers and responded with generosity, at least in her imagination. (If it had been my imagination, I would’ve been wiping the floor with those boys and making the girls fall grovelingly in love with me so I could reject them.) She doesn’t like strangers touching her. It’s all I can say. There’s only so much you can say about a wife.
Here a few punch lines suggest themselves:
“I mean to her face.”
“Unless she’s your wife.”
“If you want to keep her.”
Baddabing.
Marriage accommodates all sorts of betrayals. It is, in a sense, betrayal’s dedicated environment, a hot air balloon whose skin is so easily punctured by the pointy accessories of its passengers, a high-heeled shoe, a tiepin, a toothpick. I may not know if I want to keep my wife, but I don’t want to betray her, or at least not her privacy, considering that her sense of privacy is essentially what caused her to flinch when I first tried to touch her face. A person is a laminated entity, and the body is only one of its layers. It may not be the most intimate one. There are beaches where people—not even very good-looking people— promenade on the dunes gaily displaying their genitals like designer purses. There are rooms where strangers proclaim their secrets to each other in voices choked with snot and tears: they pay money for this. The appeal of these practices is the appeal of divestiture, a word that comes from the Latin for “to take off clothing.” They’re supposed to make you feel lighter, though clothing doesn’t weigh very much and secrets weigh nothing at all. In an attempt to combine the two kinds of divestiture, F. and I once imagined a therapeutic retreat where people would strip naked and partner up, with one partner lying on her (or his) back with her (or his) feet clasped in the yoga position known as the “Happy Baby,” while the other peered studiously into the body cavities thus exposed with the aid of a flashlight and magnifying glass. “Intimacy,” the group leader would croon, “means ‘into-me-see.’”
To me the definitive image of nakedness has always been Masaccio’s The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The Adam and Eve depicted in it don’t look light. Adam’s back is bowed. Eve is covering her breasts and sex. She doesn’t do this like someone shielding herself from a lustful gaze; she covers them the way one covers a wound. Curiously, Masaccio’s Adam doesn’t cover his parts but his face, as people do when they weep. Even children do this, from a very young age. I think of these two figures as personifying two kinds of violated privacy, the privacy of the body and the privacy of the soul.
The soul is often thought of as residing in the eyes. “I looked into his eyes and saw his soul,” George W. Bush said after meeting the Russian premier. Proust is more long-winded, though his long-windedness is dictated by precision. He calls the eyes “those features in which the flesh becomes a mirror and gives us the illusion that it allows us, more often than through other parts of the body, to approach the soul.”
Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from The Garden of Eden (1426–1428), Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine. Courtesy of the Granger Collection.
F. and I went to see the Expulsion a few years ago in Florence. It was July, a terrible time to be there, so hot we had only to step out of the hotel to feel the air being sucked from our lungs, and verminous with tourists. We were part of that vermin. We walked for many hours, uncomplainingly, down narrow streets, past shops selling gold-stamped leather goods or old maps or ice cream. Every so often we’d enter a square where a crowd milled around a gigantic dome like an ant colony around a fallen sugar bun. The Expulsion was located in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. It was part of a sequence of frescoes Masaccio had painted in the Brancacci Chapel. A few feet away people were praying. My wife was surprised by that. She hadn’t been in many churches before, and not until she came to Italy had she been in one where the cults of God and art were worshipped side by side with no apparent friction between their adherents. The art viewers stood, talking in (mostly) low voices; the churchgoers sat in silence. We looked at the painting. The bowed figures seemed small, humble, two ordinary humans who, out of a momentary desire, a whim, had tripped the switch of the doomsday machine of sin and death. Adam’s body was the body of the laborer he would become, condemned to wrest his food from the earth and eat it salted with sweat and tears. Eve had the spreading hips and drooping breasts of someone who has already borne children. In Genesis this doesn’t happen until after the expulsion; the expulsion is the first punishment. But my guess is that Masaccio wanted viewers to see the full consequences of that first act of disobedience, and so he had shown Adam and Eve stumbling out of paradise, shamefaced and weeping, their flesh already marked with their sin.
I turned to point this out to F., but she’d left my side. I found her in one of the pews, sitting with her hands folded in her lap. “What are you doing?” I asked her. She said, “I’m praying.” Then she asked, “Do you want to pray with me?” I said yes. I did as well as I was able. The walls of the chapel were pale gray marble or granite; light seemed to dwell beneath their surface. I stole a glance at my wife. She was looking straight ahead, and in profile I could see that her eyes were deeply sunken. That always happens when she’s upset. I knew what she was praying for. She was praying for a cat.
The first person I called after hanging up on Bruno was Sherri, who usually watched the cats for us when we went away. I felt sheepish, considering that I was asking her for help finding the cat the kid we’d hired in her place had lost. I might have explained that the only reason we’d done that was because at twenty bucks a visit we couldn’t afford to hire her for an entire month, but then she could have reminded me that you get what you pay for. However, she was gracious. She doubted Biscuit had gone very far. She was a bright animal who knew where her Friskies were dished out, and she was probably just wandering around the property, sheltering beneath the eaves of the barn when it got too wet. Sherri said she’d come over and help look for her. In the meantime, Bruno should be sure to call Biscuit from different locations on the property, not just from the porch but from the driveway and the front door and the toolshed out back, and leave out a bowl of food to remind her that home was where good things came from. I phoned Bruno to repeat these instructions, but he didn’t pick up. Maybe he was still outside, calling, “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” in the rain. Maybe he’d turned off his phone.
I don’t remember whom else I phoned that evening, only that I mostly stayed in the kitchen, gazing out the window into the yard. Once or twice I stepped out onto the deck to pace until the rain—for it was raining where I was too—forced me back inside. I couldn’t stay still, but I didn’t want to go anywhere else in the house. It would mean losing sight of the big live oak and the beds of modest, garden-variety flowers and the lawn I clipped with a rickety mechanical push mower whose unamplified whirr was so much more pleasing than the engorged growl of the Sears Craftsman I used up north. I kept the deck lights on. I often saw cats sunning themselves in the yard, and maybe on some unconscious level, I thought that if I waited long enough, I would see Biscuit there too.
I don’t remember Bitey going into heat, only bringing her back from the vet after she’d been spayed. She was so listless I had to scoop her out of the carrier. She rose unsteadily and looked about her, then drank a little water before stumbling off to the spot by the radiator where she liked to sleep. I watched her through the day. Did she always sleep this long? Did her stomach look swollen, or was that just because it was shaved? (The awful nakedness of a cat’s shaved stomach!) Shouldn’t she be drinking more? I was used to sick people. All through my teens my mother and grandfather took turns trooping in and out of the hospital like the allegorical figures in those clocks you see looming over town squares all over Germany. I once saw one whose automata included Death, gliding out in his black shroud, wielding his scythe with a jerk. But sick people can tell you what’s wrong with them, more or less, and what they want. Sick animals can’t. You have to read them. You lean over them as you would lean over a book, gauging the rise and fall of their breath, the luffing of a ribcage, a wheeze, a sigh, the twitch of a lip. Of course, Bitey wasn’t sick then, just postoperative, and a day later she was eating normally and chasing wads of cellophane around the living room.
She seemed not to miss her uterus, no more than Ching, the stripy male I got to keep her company a year later, seemed to miss his balls after they were snipped off. The night before his procedure, Bitey wrestled him onto his back and began roughly grooming him. (Felinologists call this behavior al-logrooming and identify it with dominance. You can spot the top cat in any colony by seeing which one most frequently grooms the others.) At one point it looked as if she was about to lick his genitals, but he pushed her away with his forepaws like someone trying to hold a door shut against the pounding of housebreakers. “Don’t stop her, you fool!” I yelled at him. “It’s your last chance!” It was no use; it might not have been even if he’d had an inkling of what I was yelling about.
Well, he must have had an inkling. On an average, male cats roam some three times farther than females, and given that both genders need roughly the same amount of food, one assumes it’s because the males are looking for sex. This is borne out by a study by Olof Liberg, in which dominant—that is, breeding—male house cats were found to have an average roaming range of 350 to 380 hectares versus 80 for nonbreeding “subordinates.” You don’t have to travel very far if you’re only going out for carton of milk.
Of course, those roaming cats were acting on the same imperative that made Biscuit stalk through the house presenting her swollen genitals for somebody to do something with: they were acting on instinct. What I’d like to know is how they experienced that instinct, whether it was just a blind hormonal goading or was accompanied by thought, or some version of thought. Did those dominant males have an internal schema of sex that summoned them out of their houses, made them cross yards and slink under hedges, skitter up trees, creep into culverts, dart across roads where cars shot past in sprays of dust and exhaust, avid, tireless, pausing only to sniff and twitch their ears? Did they know what they were after? Not in words, I mean, but in pictures—say, the silhouette of a lordotic female—or as an archetypal scent they had been born knowing and whose corporeal traces they kept seeking in the fragrant air?
I have in mind something like the sexual theories of young children, those murky ideas of sticking one part into another part that used to trouble me when I was six or seven, referring as they did to something I already wanted to do without being at all clear as to what it was. The indeterminacy is suggested by the first dirty joke I remember learning. John Wayne meets Marilyn Monroe and asks her, “You want to come to my house?” Marilyn Monroe says, “Sure.” They go to his house, and he asks her, “Can I go to bed with you?” and Marilyn Monroe says, “Okay, but don’t get any ideas.” So John Wayne gets into bed with Marilyn Monroe. “This is nice,” he says. “Don’t you think it’s nice?” Marilyn Monroe says, “It’s okay, I guess. But don’t get any ideas.” Then he asks her, “Can I feel your boobies?” She says, “Sure, but don’t get any ideas.” So Marilyn Monroe shows John Wayne her boobies, and he feels them with his hands. Then John Wayne says, “Hey, can I put my finger in your belly button?” And Marilyn Monroe says, “Oh, okay, but don’t get any ideas.” After a while, Marilyn Monroe says, “Hey, that’s not my belly button.” John Wayne says, “That’s okay. That’s not my finger.”
I heard this joke in my first year of grade school, from the boy sitting at the desk next to mine. I don’t remember anything about him, but I can still remember the sweet voltage that tore through me as I got his meaning. “That’s not my finger.” For a moment, I was almost too shocked to laugh. Then I did, out of the same shock that had struck me dumb a moment before. I can’t imagine how I kept it quiet, but I must have, or else Mrs. Mehrer would have been on top of me, wanting to know what was so funny and if I’d like to share it with the other children. This was what the entire world knew. Now I did too.
In the months before F. and I got married, I was unexpectedly haunted by thoughts of the women I would never have sex with. I thought about women I knew and women I walked past on the street or sat across from in the subway, women I glimpsed in movie lines, women who bumped me with their shopping carts in the narrow aisles of the discount gourmet. I’d turn, readying my most ferocious glare, but the moment I saw their eyes burning back at me, it was all I could do not to swoon onto the cheese counter. I was like the teenaged St. Augustine, blinded by “the mists of passion that steamed up,” as one translation puts it, “out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh.” But I was in my forties. I pined for women I eavesdropped on in restaurants. How guilty I felt for listening to them! Their fragmentary conversations were so hot. Even their toughness was flirtatious. Their flirting was like a punch in the mouth. “He says, $850, take it or leave it. I say I’ll leave it.” “Uh oh, you’re getting the oysters. Does that mean I’m in trouble?” It drove me crazy. F. could have said the same things, and I would barely have noticed. She’s not coy that way, and she wouldn’t ask if she was in trouble unless she’d gotten a letter from the IRS.
In the first sentence of the preceding paragraph, the operative word, the word that lends it force, is “never.” The women I would never have sex with. Had any of those women been available to me—had I been available to them—I doubt I would have felt much of anything. I could have overheard them talking about their orgasms. Their charge was the charge of the forbidden. In an earlier time, I might have spoken of those women as forbidden fruit, in keeping with the tradition that links sexual transgression to the prototypical transgression of the first human beings. A difference is that in Genesis, the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge is not in itself arousing. God warns Adam against eating its fruit, and Adam doesn’t think about it; he’s too busy naming the animals. Not even slutty Eve would have conceived a yen for that fruit if not for the serpent telling her how delicious it was, and so rich in antioxidants. Only in the erotic sphere do prohibitions have the opposite effect, giving their objects the sheen and perfume of the most wonderful fruit that ever hung from a branch—not the hackneyed apple, which is so often woody or mushy and whose hard core gouges the palate, but the grape, as is written in the Zohar, or the fig, which when split open so resembles a woman’s sex. What you can’t have is what you want. Because I knew their outcome—because I knew they would have no outcome—my encounters—or, more accurately, my sightings—always had an elegiac quality. It may not have been that different from what the very ill and the very old feel as they do things for what they suspect will be the last time: the last time they walk through the park; the last time they sit beneath a chestnut tree and watch the sunlight streaming through its leaves; the last cup of strong coffee; the last time someone they love combs their hair. What I felt for those women wasn’t just desire, which by itself may not be enough to make you sag against the cheese counter at the Fairway; it was mourning.
During this time I got an assignment from a tony sex magazine to write a story about a woman who goes around the city looking for a zipless fuck. It was basically an occasion for a photographer to take pictures—I mean good pictures, suitable for National Geographic—of half-dressed models pretending to have sex in different semipublic locations. There was no real reason for me to be there. I just liked the leggy photographer. She specialized in rockers, and she treated me as if I were Wayne Coyne, an aging, second-tier celebrity whose second-tierness was exactly what made him hip. We met in what was nominally a strip club. Under a recent city ordinance, however, it had become illegal for women to show their nipples in public, so all the venue could offer was some sad girls in bras jogging dully in place on a platform behind the bar, ignored by everybody. “Do you know what the chicks who work in these places call them?” the photographer asked me. It’d been years since I’d heard anyone use the word “chicks.” “Stopless bars.”
“Not tipless bars?”
She laughed in my ear. “That’s good. I’m going to tell that to somebody.”
We collected the female model, who was a friend of hers, and took taxis from one location to the next. At each stop, our protagonist would pose with a different partner, a waxy corporate mannequin, a bike messenger with a mane of tumbling black curls, a bouncy exotic dancer who kept snapping off backbends. The night got hotter and more humid until, as we were hauling our gear between locations, the sky burst with a biblical roar, and we were pummeled with what might have been lead shot. For the rest of the night, we did our work to the drumming of falling water. We went from the photographer’s apartment building to a boutique hotel on the Upper East Side and back to her apartment. By then it was early morning, and we were all exhausted. The model could barely prop herself up on some pillows to fondle the exotic dancer. When the photographer told her she could get dressed, she let out a groan of relief and called her boyfriend to come pick her up. I stayed behind to help with the lights. Outside it was still raining. “You’re never going to get a taxi,” the photographer told me. We looked at each other. Her eyes were blue but looked black because of her makeup. I don’t remember whether F. was down in the city that night. She may have been traveling. Regardless of where she was, she’d put no pressure on me to come home and would be unlikely to question me too closely even if I were to walk in while the neighborhood parents were seeing their kids off to preschool in the street below. This reticence is one of her most attractive features, and also one of her most unnerving. In somebody else, it might indicate a fear of learning something unpleasant, but I think F.’s reticence has more to do with her sense of dignity, her fear of debasing yours or sacrificing her own. In either case, I wouldn’t have to lie.
Still, I left. I could say that I was thinking of the vows I was supposed to recite in another few months or that between the photographer and F. there was no choice. But, really, who was asking me to make a choice? (The allure of infidelity—one of the allures—is the allure of not choosing. You can have both.) It may be more correct to say that I had too vivid a picture of how I’d feel on waking up next to the photographer, how anxious I’d be to get away, and how anxious I’d be not to seem too eager about it, which would—I knew this from earlier occasions, before I met F.—make me stay later and later, until she’d either gotten the wrong impression or was good and sick of me. It may be that much of my loyalty to F. arises from my sense that she is the only person I wouldn’t, to one extent or another, want to get away from when I woke beside her in the morning, not because she’s the person I’m sanctioned to wake beside but because of all the people I might wake or have woken up beside, she is the only one with whom I can feel alone, as in the Frank O’Hara poem that ends, “You are emptying the world so we can be alone.”
It may also be that I realized that the photographer wasn’t sending me sexual signals so much as observing professional etiquette. Feature reporters have to pretend they’re fascinated by everybody they interview, and maybe people who photograph rock stars have to keep up the impression that they’re aroused by everybody on a shoot, even extending the courtesy to writers. I could say that being present on a sex shoot had an effect opposite to that of looking at the resulting photographs. It was too much process. When I think back to what I saw through the photographer’s viewfinder, I recall the highlights on a man’s pecs, the inky Möbius of a twisted bra strap, the fraught synapse between an upright nipple and a suppliant tongue. How many angels might waltz in that gap. When I think back to what I saw in front of me, though, I remember the photographer making her model friend sit up for a shot rather than lie back because if she lay back her tits would pancake to the side. The model was tired, and she complained, but I could see the photographer was right.
She was right about taxis too. The whole way home, one after another skidded past me, stuffed with grateful passengers or with its “Off Duty” sign burning like a brand. I had to walk blocks before I found an empty one, and by then I was so wet I might as well have saved myself the ten bucks.
In both cats and humans, it’s mostly the male that roams in pursuit of sex. The rule, however, isn’t ironclad. Many years ago I had a friend whom a teenaged diving accident had left a paraplegic. He couldn’t get hard-ons. He once came to me upset because he’d learned that just before they got married, his wife had had sex with another man. She’d wanted to know if she could bear to go the rest of her life without fucking, and she knew of no way to be sure without actually doing it, as it turned out, with a neighbor in their apartment complex. She’d decided she could. Somebody else might have treated this as grounds for divorce. My friend stayed with his wife. A few years later, he was surgically outfitted with a penis pump that enabled him to have intercourse as often and as long as he wanted. He and his wife were happy for many years until he died from complications from his old injury.
“Do you want to know what I felt then?”
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“I felt desire.”
At some point on the night of September 29, I went into my office and tried Skyping F. at the residency, which was how we’d been talking. The phone, or I guess the computer, rang in that strange, wet way, as if each ring were a bubble rising through hundreds of feet of green-black water from the hold of a ship sunken on the sea floor. In my mind, the horizontal distance between us translated into a vertical distance. I was the one at the bottom. No one answered. Well, where F. was, it was long after midnight. She’d probably shut down her laptop for the night.
Earlier in the day, she’d sent me an e-mail that ended with a question about the financial tidal wave that had begun sweeping the world a few weeks before, snatching up trillions of dollars in its rush. She wanted to know if we were going to lose our retirement savings. “Possibly yes,” I wrote back now. “I’ll tell you more yesterday. Bruno told me that Biscuit’s been gone for 2 days, and I’m sick with worry. I’m waiting to hear more from him—Sherri’s been helping him look for her—but I may fly up there this weekend to see if I have better luck.” I was already thinking of going up to New York to look for Biscuit myself.
It’s only on rereading this message that I realize I typed “yesterday” when I meant “tomorrow.”
A while after we had Biscuit spayed, I became conscious of a high-pitched whine that seemed to be coming from just outside my office. I thought it might be somebody doing construction down the block or a disturbance in the phone lines. But I couldn’t figure out what kind of power tool would make a sound like that, steadily, for hours on end, and when I called the phone company, I was assured that their lines had never been known to whine. F. came into the room, listened quizzically in that way she has, standing very still with her small, dear head cocked to one side, and then said she thought the sound was coming from inside the house. “You’re crazy,” I told her. Then I put my ear against the wall. I recoiled as if it were on fire. Up close, the sound was enveloping. It wasn’t a whine; it was a drone, shrill enough to make the hair on my arms stand on end and at the same time inward, meditative, monastic.
The wall was infested with bees. F. worried about being stung, but I thought it more likely we’d be driven mad, or I would be; I was the one who worked in that room. Now that I knew what was making it, the hum, which before had been merely puzzling, gave me the creeps. I asked the landlord for advice on driving out an infestation of bees. “Drive them out? Jesus, you don’t ‘drive them out.’” He was large and red faced, and his politics were to the right of the emperor Nero’s, but I respected his industry and lack of bullshit, and I think it amused him to see somebody who worked with his mind proposing to drive out vermin. He came over, drilled a hole in the Sheetrock, sprayed in some industrial-grade bug killer, then capped the hole with a butterfly screw. We waited for the humming to stop. It didn’t. Outside the window I saw a dark plume of bees issue from the side of the house like smoke and hang in the air, but it was just a detachment from the main colony. We pulled out the screw and quickly jammed the bug spray can’s nozzle into the hole before bees could pour out of it and added a few more lethal squirts. This time, the humming seemed to get louder. It sounded angry. I told my wife, “We’d better not go outside.” Biscuit had jumped up on a chair and was staring with interest at the screw in the wall. F. picked her up. “And keep the cats in.”
The killing took almost three days. When it became clear that spraying inside the house was only displacing small numbers of insects, the landlord sent over some workmen to drill holes in the outer wall, especially in the insulation around the chimney. Then they tore off a soffit and sprayed there. Even with the windows shut, the house stank. We worried about our central nervous systems, and about the cats’, which were more sensitive. Every time Biscuit raced across the floor for no reason or rolled onto her side and tried to disembowel a table leg with her hind feet, we thought the worst. The humming mounted; the bees stormed out in greater numbers, like cavalry making sorties from a besieged fortress. The workmen sweltered beneath the July sun in padded jackets and canvas gloves. The cats clamored to go out. At some point the extermination began to take effect. Soon there were no bees by the back door. Then, in a coordinated assault, the landlord drilled a second hole in the office wall, and the two of us sprayed in more bug killer in unison. Along with the cans of Bee Gone, he’d brought along a sprayer, the kind with a pump that you see in old cartoons, with no markings on it, but he didn’t use that yet.
The buzzing surged, and for a moment it was as if we were inside a huge electrical transformer. A curtain of insects blackened the air from above the window almost to the ground. The landlord threw the window open and worked the pump of his archaic sprayer. The curtain fell. It fell all at once, as if cut loose from an invisible rod, with a soft patter. Afterward the yard was crunchy with tiny, desiccated corpses. I worried that Biscuit would eat them and be poisoned, but she steered clear of them. She may have been repelled by the stench of whatever it was that had come out of that unmarked canister or simply been uninterested in something that was already dead. Unlike dogs, cats have no taste for carrion.
I have stated my problem with the term “forbidden fruit”—I mean its association with the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, which probably wasn’t an apple at all. Adam and Eve may have eaten that fruit in spite of God’s injunction, but they didn’t eat
because of it. The true forbidden fruit may be the pears Augustine writes about in the
Confessions. He was sixteen. They grew on a tree close to his family’s vineyard in Thagaste, and neither their color nor their flavor was special:
But late one night, having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was—a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden.
Augustine, by the way, believed that before the Fall, sex was a purely voluntary act and not the tortured impulse it has been ever since. Adam willed his erections the way somebody wills a handshake. When he did, however, he was probably being more than just friendly.
The Animals in the Garden of Eden
This is a Gnostic legend from the early Christian era. Because God created Adam and Eve as vegetarians (“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food”), they really had no need of the animals over which they had been given dominion, not even the beasts of burden, for they could get all the food they wanted without plowing, and they had no possessions that had to be carried. Nor did the animals need people, and so in those first days they kept mostly to themselves. The only exceptions were the dog and the cat. The dog already liked humans—Adam, especially, who threw him sticks—and the cat was curious about them. They were so outlandish. Of all the creatures in the Garden, they alone had no fur and walked upright on their hind legs, and whenever they saw the cat, they made a sound that in time he understood was meant to make him come to them. Sometimes he did.
And so on the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the dog and the cat were nearby. When Adam took a bite of the fruit Eve had given him, the dog came closer, wagging his tail and grinning as if to ask, “Maybe something for me?” And Adam tore off some of the fruit and gave it to him. It was the first time a human had fed an animal by hand or, indeed, fed one at all. Now the cat came up to them. He did it only out of curiosity, but the woman thought he was hungry, so she took a piece of the fruit, a small piece because it was so sweet and so nice and already she was inflamed by a feeling no one had ever felt before—greed—and held it out in her hand as the man had done with the dog. The cat approached and sniffed the fruit, his tail flicking, but he wouldn’t eat it. No one thought to lay the fruit on the ground—where the cat still might not have eaten it—and in the next moment the woman gave in to her greed and ate the fruit herself, sucking the pulp from her fingers and sighing because she wished there were more. The cat watched her.
Then God came, and they knew what they had done. He sentenced the people to unceasing toil and the pangs of childbirth and, saving the worst for last, death. Then he looked at the dog and the cat. What was he going to do with them? The dog, sensing trouble, hung his head and began to whimper. The cat looked up at God. I don’t know if it was the dog’s crying or the cat’s unblinking gaze that softened him. “Well, I only warned those two,” God said to himself. “Those people.” It was the first time that anyone had ever spoken in a voice filled with disgust. He looked at the animals. “How were these ones supposed to know? The poor, dumb creatures.” And so they were spared everything except death. That was nonnegotiable.
But from then on, the Lord added, the animals’ fate would be tied up with that of the humans, for if they hadn’t taken part in the humans’ sin, they had still been its witnesses. He asked them what they wanted to do. The dog said, “Let me go with the people, even out of Paradise, and wander with them over the earth. I’ll help them get their food, and I’ll sleep with them by their fires, and when the woman has babies, I’ll stand guard over them, for they are weak creatures.” And God said, “Good dog! Go with my blessing.”
But the cat didn’t want to go with the people. He liked them well enough, but it was the Garden he was attached to, its high, soft grasses, its encyclopedia of smells. “Let me stay in this place and be its familiar spirit until you see fit to let the man and the woman back in. When you do, I’ll be there to welcome them.” And God said, “Good cat! Abide here with my blessing.”
This is why dogs stay close to people and travel at their side, following the example of their first ancestor. And this is why cats stay in the house, or nearby, in emulation of the one cat who dwells in Paradise, waiting for the people to return. On that day, he will greet the man and the woman at the gate and braid himself about their ankles, gazing up at them and purring. In the meantime, he keeps the mice down.
